 |
Ben Garvin for The New York Times
John J. Choi, left, the county
attorney for Ramsey County, Minn., and John Ristad with files in their
case against Thomas and Lisa Eilertson.
|
Now the New York Times has weighed into the 'sovereignty' debate with an article that is eerily similar to others created within the corporate media structures. Change does not come easily and the powers that be do not want to give up their power. Perhaps it is a bridge too far to expect that publications like this will pay any respect to people that do not conform to its beliefs regarding the structure of society, but, it is nonetheless interesting to note that they are referring to 'experts' that are either in prison or are David:Wynn-Miller.
Nevertheless, the paper does use the Anti Defamation League as a source of 'authority' and happily cites violence, racism and paper warfare/paper terrorism as being factual without bothering to share any supporting evidence.
Clearly, this is your garden variety fear based story, bereft of factual information except for when it advances the journalists position.
Of course this story isn't for 'us', it is in fact, a 'blue pill', designed to make ordinary people run for the hills if they hear anything in conversation about your common law rights, or, knowing & standing up for your rights. These pills are just like the blue pills that they have dispensed about false flag terrorism, protesting, vaccines or fluoride to name a few.
The fact that they are even writing articles like this in the NY Times illustrates the fact that a lot of people are waking up and ignoring the usual sources of authority in determining what is true and false in the world around them.
MINNEAPOLIS — One of the first inklings Sheriff Richard Stanek had that
something was wrong came with a call from the mortgage company handling
his refinancing.
“It must be a mistake,” he said, when the loan officer told him that
someone had placed liens totaling more than $25 million on his house and
on other properties he owned.
But as Sheriff Stanek soon learned, the liens, legal claims on property
to secure the payment of a debt, were just the earliest salvos in a war
of paper, waged by a couple who had lost their home to foreclosure in
2009 — a tactic that, with the spread of an anti-government ideology
known as the “sovereign citizen” movement, is being employed more
frequently as a way to retaliate against perceived injustices.
Over the next three years, the couple, Thomas and Lisa Eilertson, filed
more than $250 billion in liens, demands for compensatory damages and
other claims against more than a dozen people, including the sheriff,
county attorneys, the Hennepin County registrar of titles and other
court officials.
“It affects your credit rating, it affected my wife, it affected my
children,” Sheriff Stanek said of the liens. “We spent countless hours
trying to undo it.”
Cases involving sovereign citizens are surfacing increasingly here in
Minnesota and in other states, posing a challenge to law enforcement
officers and court officials, who often become aware of the movement — a
loose network of groups and individuals who do not recognize the
authority of federal, state or municipal government — only when they
become targets. Although the filing of liens for outrageous sums or
other seemingly frivolous claims might appear laughable, dealing with
them can be nightmarish, so much so that the F.B.I. has labeled the
strategy “paper terrorism.” A lien can be filed by anyone under the
Uniform Commercial Code.
Occasionally, people who identify with the movement have erupted into
violence. In Las Vegas this week, the police said that an undercover
sting operation stopped a plot to torture and kill police officers in
order to bring attention to the movement. Two people were arrested. In
2010, two police officers in Arkansas were killed while conducting a
traffic stop with a father and son involved in the movement.
Mostly, though, sovereign citizens choose paper as their weapon. In
Gadsden, Ala., three people were arrested in July for filing liens
against victims including the local district attorney and Treasury
Secretary Jacob J. Lew. And in Illinois this month, a woman who, like
most sovereign citizens, chose to represent herself in court, confounded a federal judge by asking him to rule on a flurry of unintelligible motions.
“I hesitate to rank your statements in order of just how bizarre they
are,” the judge told the woman, who was facing charges of filing
billions of dollars in false liens.
“The convergence of the evidence strongly suggests a movement that is
flourishing,” said Mark Pitcavage, the director of investigative
research for the Anti-Defamation League. “It is present in every single
state in the country.”
The sovereign citizen movement traces its roots to white extremist
groups like the Posse Comitatus of the 1970s, and the militia movement.
Terry L. Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombing conspirator, counted himself
a sovereign citizen. But in recent years it has drawn from a much wider
demographic, including blacks, members of Moorish sects and young
Occupy protesters, said Detective Moe Greenberg of the Baltimore County
Police Department, who has written about the movement.
The ideology seems to attract con artists, the financially desperate and
people who are fed up with bureaucracy, Mr. Pitcavage said, adding,
“But we’ve seen airline pilots, we’ve seen federal law enforcement
officers, we’ve seen city councilmen and millionaires get involved with
this movement.”
Sovereign citizens believe that in the 1800s, the federal government was
gradually subverted and replaced by an illegitimate government. They
create their own driver’s licenses and include their thumbprints on
documents to distinguish their flesh and blood person from a “straw man”
persona that they say has been created by the false government. When
writing their names, they often add punctuation marks like colons or
hyphens.
Adherents to the movement have been involved in a host of debt evasion
schemes and mortgage and tax frauds. Two were convicted in Cleveland
recently for collecting $8 million in fraudulent tax refunds from the
I.R.S. And in March, Tim Turner, the leader of one large group, the
Republic for the united States of America, was sentenced in Alabama to
18 years in federal prison. (His group does not capitalize the first
letter in united.)
Sovereign citizens who file creditor claims are helped by the fact that
in most states, the secretary of state must accept any lien that is
filed without judging its validity.
The National Association of Secretaries of State released a report in
April on sovereign citizens, urging state officials to find ways to
expedite the removal of liens and increase penalties for fraudulent
filings. More than a dozen states have enacted laws giving state filing
offices more discretion in accepting liens, and an increasing number of
states have passed or are considering legislation to toughen the
penalties for bogus filings.
The Eilertsons, who were charged with 47 counts of fraudulent filing and
sentenced in June to 23 months in prison, were prosecuted under a
Minnesota law that makes it a felony to file fraudulent documents to
retaliate against officials. John Ristad, an assistant Ramsey County
attorney who handled the case, said he believed the Eilertsons were the
first offenders to be prosecuted under the law. “It got me angry,” he
said, “because at the end of the day, these two are bullies who think
they can get their way by filing paper.”
The liens were filed against houses, vehicles and even mineral rights.
In an affidavit, the Hennepin County examiner of titles said that in a
conversation with the Eilertsons about their foreclosure, one of them
told her, “We’re gonna have to lien ya.” The examiner later found that a
lien for more than $5.1 million had been placed on her property.
If the purpose was to instill trepidation, it worked. Several county and
state officials said in interviews that they worried that they might
once again find themselves in the crosshairs. One state employee said it
was scarier to engage with offenders who used sovereign citizen tactics
than with murderers, given the prospect of facing lawsuits or fouled
credit ratings.
Like many who identify with the ideology, the Eilertsons learned the
techniques of document filing online from one of many sovereign citizen
“gurus” who offer instruction or seminars around the country.
In hours of recorded conversation found by the authorities on their
computer, the Eilertsons consulted with a man identified on the
recordings as Paul Kappel, learning what he called “death by a thousand
paper cuts.”
Mr. Eilertson, interviewed at the state prison in Bayport, Minn., denied
being anti-government or belonging to any movement. But he was familiar
with the names of some figures associated with sovereign citizen
teachings, including an activist named David Wynn Miller, who Mr. Eilertson said was “ahead of his time.” (Mr. Miller writes his name as David-Wynn: Miller.)
Mr. Eilertson, who had no previous criminal record, said his actions
were an effort to fight back against corrupt banks that had handed off
the couple’s mortgage time after time and whose top executives never
faced consequences for their actions.
“It seemed like we were being attacked every day,” he said. “We needed some way to stop the foreclosure.
“We tried to do our part with as much information as we had available,”
he said, though he conceded that “it kind of got out of control
eventually.”
ETHICAL DONATORS AND COMMUNITY MEMBERS
REQUIRED, TO FILL THIS SPACE WITH YOUR POLITICAL SLOGANS, ADVERTISING
OFFERS, WEBSITE DETAILS, CHARITY REQUESTS, LECTURE OPPORTUNITIES,
EDUCATIONAL WORKSHOPS, SPIRITUAL AND/OR HEALTH ENLIGHTENMENT COURSES.AS AN IMPORTANT MEMBER OF THE GLOBAL INDEPENDENT MEDIA COMMUNITY, MIKIVERSE LAW HONOURABLY REQUESTS YOUR HELP TO KEEP YOUR NEWS, DIVERSE,AND FREE OF CORPORATE, GOVERNMENT SPIN AND CONTROL. FOR MORE INFORMATION ON HOW YOU MAY ASSIST, PLEASE CONTACT: themikiverse@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment